Have the Chipmunks been running wild in your yard lately?

We’ve been noticing a lot more in ours, partly due to my 3 year old daughter’s new obsession with the book, Marc and Pixie by Louise Fatio.  This is one of those books we picked up at a yard sale for a quarter, and she instantly fell in love with it.  You can find it used on Amazon, but it’s pretty tough to locate.

In this book, a man named Mr. Angelo built walls for Mrs. Jones and then a whole family of Chipmunks moved into the nooks in the walls, including one little chipmunk named Marc.  Everything was going swimmingly until Mrs. Jones got herself a cat named Pixie.  In the end, Marc and Pixie ended up friends, but I won’t ruin the story line for you — it’s a cute little ending.  It’s a great book about helping others, appreciating others, and making new friends.

Since we’ve been reading this book so much, we decided to build a “Chipmunk Wall” just like we saw in the book.  This craft would be perfect for any book about a wall or any book about chipmunks for that matter, because chipmunks like to build their burrows in little crevices such as those found in a stone wall.   Shall we get started?

What You Need:

• Green Construction paper for the background 
• Glue
• Brown, Gray, Black and White construction paper (torn up into bits) for the wall

What You Do:

Once all your pieces are torn and ready, hand over the glue and let your little one get to work.  If you’re still working on colors, this is a great time to review as you go along.  I know my daughter has some trouble with black and brown when she first got started, so this would be a great opportunity to go over those colors again.

If you have an older kid, you could also count the number of stones in each row or even challenge them to find stones that fit pretty well together — sort of like a puzzle.

My daughter was really excited about this craft, even though it was pretty simple.  She just kept saying, “Look at the wall I built!”

Gluing! Gluing! Gluing!

It just keeps getting taller!

My 1.5 year old son also attempted this project, but as you can see — he doesn’t have the diligence of his sister just yet!  :)

Finished!  A perfect wall for little chipmunks to play in.  If you wanted to take it one step further, you could use some tiny chipmunk stickers and put them all over the wall to represent Marc and his very large family.  Stickers are great for fine motor practice, but I couldn’t find any little chipmunk stickers myself.

Follow-up Questions to Discuss with Your Little One

• Why did Mr. Angelo build walls?
• Who loved living in the walls?
• What happened to Pixie when she jumped out the window?
• What are some nice things that Pixie and Marc said to one another?
• In the end, what happened with Pixie and Marc?

More Chipmunk Freebies to Check Out:

• Chipmunk Tracks: What do they look like?
• Chipmunk Coloring Pages: Lots of realistic pages! 
• Rodent Study: Free Printable Nature Notebook Page by Handbook of Nature Study (great resources here!)
• Chipmunk Nature Study Lesson Plan
• All About Printable from Kelli (the same one we used with the Polar Bear lesson)
• Chipmunk Lesson Plan for Pre-K Teachers
• Preschool Lesson Plan about Chipmunks

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